TOR'S OVERVIEW
Sisyphus and Christ
I
n Greek mythology, Sisyphus had been condemned by the gods
to push a rock to the top of a mountain, where it would of its
own weight fall to the bottom. Sisyphus would shove it back up,
only to have it roll down, again and again, the process continuing
forever. The idea was that no punishment could be worse than
futile, hopeless labor.
A few millennia after the story was first told, Frenchman Albert
Camus wrote a short book entitled
The Myth of Sisyphus.
Written
during World War II, the book used Sisyphus as a metaphor of
human existence itself. Because life has no meaning, Camus asked
Is it worth living? If all the energy, effort, and passion needed to
exist is like Sisyphus's labor, hopeless and futile, why bother?
Camus has a point, at least, given his premise: If there is no God,
then this existence—with all its trials, pain, perplexities, and absur-
dities—is all that we have and are and, therefore, is meaningless.
Our whole essence is contained in, and limited by, our own mortal-
ity. Nothing transcends it, nothing exceeds it. Our life is its own
end, and because our end always dissolves into dust, what can it
mean? Obviously, not much.
Camus, however, wasn't the only one to realize the futility of
human life in and of itself. Centuries earlier, Paul said the same thing:
If nothing is beyond this life—if death caps it, consummates it, and
finalizes it—then it is all for nothing. If Christ does not come back
and raise us from the dead to immortality, then all that we have
believed in and hoped for is, he said, in "vain" (1 Cor. 15:17).
Both Paul and Camus both understood the ultimate issue: What is
the meaning of this short span of existence known as human life? The
crucial difference, then, is that while Camus had no hope, Paul did,
because Camus (at least when he wrote his essay) did not have Christ
while Paul did—and that's why Paul (and all the other Bible writers)
could express in their writings a wonderful optimism and hope amid
a world limping along in death, decay, and suffering.
This quarter, we look at that hope, a hope not in ourselves or in
anything we can do but a hope rooted and grounded in Jesus Christ,
who "gave himself for our sins" (Gal. 1:4), whose life and death at
His first coming is our surety of resurrection and eternity at His
second coming. As sure as we are that Jesus came and died for our
sins at the First Coming is as sure as we can be that He will return
and collect those for whom He died. That is hope!
Many thanks to Jonathan Gallagher of the General Conference
Public Affairs and Religious Liberty department for pulling out of
Scripture the places brimming with hope and sharing them with us.
For it is our humble hope that, once done with these lessons, we'll
all better know that however difficult our struggles and labor in this
life often can be, because of Christ's atonement at the Cross and the
hope that it brings us, our labors and struggles, unlike those of poor
Sisyphus, are not in vain.
2